Son of a legend...

There can’t be many musicians who carry a bigger legacy than Adam - son of Leonard - Cohen.

Adam, who plays Brighton’s Komedia on Monday, November 14, admits it hasn’t always been an easy heritage to bear.

“I don’t think that I have always done that in as elegant or complete or as truthful a way as I have done now.”

There were elements of success, adulation, sex and mythology: “And I got a lot of that, but I was missing the main ingredient, the main point. I didn’t realise that I really did have a responsibility that most people don’t have. I really must honour the tradition from which I came, but I don’t think I did that. I happened to be the son of a rather-well known singer-songwriter, icon and poet. For anybody that endeavours to sing or write in that vein is a difficult aim.”

Other people perhaps might have hared off in the very opposite direction.

But that wasn’t an option for Adam: “I knew that I caught the bug very early. I was seduced by music.”

It is just that it is only now, as Adam sees it, that he has found the “access code” to what it all really ought to be about: “But mostly I realised that I had to have the courage and the maturity to demonstrate and put on display the characteristics that I share with my father.”

And what would those be?

“That’s not for me to say.”

Adam comes to the UK on the back of his latest album, Like A Man, which evokes something of his father: “The album is a collection of songs that are pointing to my lineage and to the tradition that I come from. I am just very lucky to get a chance to do this and to get a last chance at it. How many times can I indulge myself like this? There is nothing that is going to make people climb around the project and make it successful.”